LONG days—the longest, objectively speaking, and with reference to the hours of daylight they contained; since their astronomical length could not affect the swift passage of them, either taken singly or in their monotonous general flow. The vernal equinox lay three months back, the solstice was at hand. But the seasons up here followed the calendar with halting steps, and only within the last few days had spring fairly arrived: a spring still without hint of summer’s denser air, rarefied, ethereal, and balmy, with the sun sending silvery gleams from a blue heaven, and the meadows blithe with parti-coloured flowers.
Hans Castorp found bluebells and yarrow on the hill-side, like the ones Joachim had put in his room to greet him when he came; and seeing them, realized how the year was rounding out. Those others had been the late blossoms of the declining summer; whereas now the tender emerald grass of the sloping meadows was thick-starred with every sort of bloom, cup-shaped, bell-shaped, star-shaped, any-shaped, filling the sunny air with warm spice and scent: quantities of wild pansies and fly-bane, daisies, red and yellow primulas, larger and finer than any Hans Castorp had ever seen down below, so far as he could recall noticing, and the nodding soldanella, peculiar to the region, with its little eye-lashed bells of rose-colour, purple, and blue.
Hans Castorp gathered a bunch of all this loveliness and took it to his room; by no means with the idea of decoration, but of set and serious scientific intent. He had assembled an apparatus to serve his need: a botanical text-book, a handy little trowel to take up roots, a herbarium, a powerful pocket-lens. The young man set to work in his loggia, clad in one of the light summer suits he had brought up with him when he came—another sign that his first year was rounding out its course.
Fresh-cut flowers stood about in glasses within his room, and on the lamp-stand beside his highly superior chair. Flowers half faded, wilted but not dry, lay scattered on the floor of the loggia and on the balustrade; others, between sheets of blottingpaper, were giving out their moisture under pressure from heavy stones. When they were quite dry and flat, he would stick them with strips of paper into his album. He lay with his knees up, one crossed over the other, the manual open face down upon his chest like a little gabled roof; holding the thick bevelled lens between his honest blue eyes and a blossom in his other hand, from which he had cut away with his pocketknife a part of the corolla, in order the better to examine the thalamus—what a great fleshy lump it looked through the powerful lens! The anthers shook out their yellow pollen on the thalamus from the tips of their filaments, the pitted pistil stood stiffly up from the ovaries; when Hans Castorp cut through it longitudinally, he could see the narrow channel through which the pollen grains and utricles were floated by the nectar secretion into the ovarian cavity. Hans Castorp counted, tested, compared; he studied the structure and grouping of calyx and petals as well as the male and female organs; compared what he found with the sketches and diagrams in his book; and saw with satisfaction that these were accurate when tested by the structure of such plants as were known to him. Then he went on to those he had not known the names of, and by the help of his Linnæus established their class, group, order, species, family, and genus. As he had time at his disposal, he actually made some progress in botanical systematization on the basis of comparative morphology. Beneath each dried specimen in his herbarium he carefully inscribed in ornamental lettering the Latin name which a humanistic science had gallantly bestowed on it; added its distinguishing characteristics, and submitted the whole to the approval of the good Joachim, who was all admiration.
Evenings he gazed at the stars. He was seized with an interest in the passing year—
he who had already spent some twenty-odd cycles upon this earth without ever troubling his head about it. If the writer has been driven to talk about the vernal equinox and suchlike, it is because these terms formed the present mental furniture of our hero, which he now loved to set out on all occasions, here too surprising his cousin by the fund of information at his command.
“The sun,” he might begin, as they took their walks together, “will soon be entering the sign of the Crab. Do you know what that means? It is the first summer sign of the zodiac, you know. Then come Leo and Virgo, and then the autumn, the equinox, toward the end of September, when the rays of the sun fall vertically upon the equator again, as they did in March, when the sun was in the sign of the Ram.”
“I regret to say it escaped my attention,” Joachim said grumpily. “What is all that you are reeling off so glibly about the Ram and the zodiac?”
“Why, you know what the zodiac is—the primitive heavenly signs: Scorpio,
Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and the rest. How can you help being interested in them? At least, you must know there are twelve of them, three for each season, the ascending and the declining year, the circle of constellations through which the sun passes. I think it’s great. Imagine, they have been found employed as ceiling decoration in an Egyptian temple—and a temple of Aphrodite, to boot—not far from Thebes. They were known to the Chaldeans too, the Chaldeans, if you please, those Arabic-Semitic old necromancers, who were so well versed in astrology and
soothsaying. They knew and studied the zone in the heavens through which the planets revolve; and they divided it into twelve signs by constellations, the dodecatemoria, just as they have been handed down to us. Magnificent, isn’t it?
There’s humanity for you!”
“You talk about humanity just like Settembrini.”
“Yes—and yet not just the same either. You have to take humanity as it is; but even so I find it magnificent. I like to think about the Chaldeans when I lie and look at the planets they were familiar with—for, clever as they were, they did not know them all. But the ones they did not know I cannot see either. Uranus was only recently discovered, by means of the telescope—a hundred and twenty years ago.”
“You call that recently?”
“I call it recently—with your kind permission—in comparison with the three thousand years since their time. But when I lie and look at the planets, even the three thousand years get to seem ‘recently,’ and I begin to think quite intimately of the Chaldeans, and how in their time they gazed at the stars and made verses on them—
and all that is humanity too.”
“I must say, you have very tall ideas in your head.”
“You call them tall, and I call them intimate—it’s all the same, whatever you like to call it. But when the sun enters Libra again, in about three months from now, the days will have shortened so much that day and night will be equal. The days keep on getting shorter until about Christmas-time, as you know. But now you must please bear in mind that, while the sun goes through the winter signs—Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces—the days are already getting longer! For then spring is on the way again—the three-thousandth spring since the Chaldeans; and the days go on lengthening until we have come round the year, and summer begins again.”
“Of course.”
“No, not of course at all—it is really all hocus-pocus. The days lengthen in the winter-time, and when the longest comes, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, they begin to go downhill again, toward winter. You call that ‘of course’; but if one once loses hold of the fact that it is of course, it is quite frightening, you feel like hanging on to something. It seems like a practical joke—that spring begins at the beginning of winter, and autumn at the beginning of summer. You feel you’re being fooled, led about in a circle, with your eye fixed on something that turns out to be a moving point. A moving point in a circle. For the circle consists of nothing but such transitional points without any extent whatever; the curvature is incommensurable, there is no duration of motion, and eternity turns out to be not ‘straight ahead’ but
‘merry-go-round’!”
“For goodness’ sake, stop!”
“The feast of the solstice—midsummer night! Fires on the mountain-top, and ring-around-a-rosy about the leaping flames! I have never seen it; but they say our rude forefathers used thus to celebrate the first summer night, the night with which autumn begins, the very midday and zenith of the year, the point from which it goes downhill again: they danced and whirled and shouted and exulted—and why, really, all that primitive exultation? Can you make it out? What were they so jolly about? Was it because from then on the world went down into the dark—or perhaps because it had up till then gone uphill, and now the turning-point was reached, the fleeting moment of midsummer night and midsummer madness, the meeting-place of tears and
laughter? I express it as it is, in the words that come to me. Tragic joy, triumphant sadness that was what made our ancestors leap and exult around the leaping flames: they did so as an act of homage to the madness of the circle, to an eternity without duration, in which everything recurs—in sheer despair, if you like.”
“But I don’t like,” growled Joachim. “Pray don’t put it off on me. Pretty large concerns you occupy yourself with, nights when you do your cure.”
“Yes, I’ll admit you are more practically occupied with your Russian grammar. Why, man, you’re bound to have perfect command of the language before long; and that will be a great advantage to you if there should be a war—which God forbid.”
“God forbid? You talk like a civilian. War is necessary. Without it, Moltke said, the world would soon go to pieces altogether it would rot.”
“Yes, it has a tendency that way, I admit. And I’ll go so far as to say,” began Hans Castorp, and was about to return to the Chaldeans, who had carried on wars too, and conquered Babylonia, even if they were a Semitic people, which was almost the same as saying they were Jews—when the cousins became simultaneously aware that two gentlemen, walking close in front of them, had been attracted by what they were saying and interrupted their own conversation to look around.
They were on the main street, between the Kurhaus and Hotel Belvedere, on their way back to the village. The valley was gay in its new spring dress, all bright and delicate colour. The air was superb. A symphony of scents from meadows full of flowers filled the pure, dry, lucent, sun-drenched air. They recognized Ludovico Settembrini, with a stranger; but it seemed as though he for his part either did not recognize them or did not care for a meeting, for he turned round again, quickened his step, and plunged into conversation, accompanied by his usual lively gestures. When the cousins came up on his right and gaily greeted him, he exclaimed: “Sapristi!” and
“Well, well, well!” with every mark of delighted surprise; yet would have held back and let them pass on, but that they failed to grasp his intention—or else saw no sense in it. For Hans Castorp was genuinely pleased to see him thus, after a lapse of time: he stopped and warmly shook hands, asked how he did, and looked in polite expectation at his companion. Settembrini was thus driven to do what he obviously preferred not to do, but what seemed the only natural thing, under the circumstances: namely, to present them to each other, which he accordingly did, with much appropriate gesticulation, and the gentlemen shook hands, half standing, half walking on. It appeared that the stranger, who might be about Settembrini’s age, was a
housemate of his, the other tenant of Lukaçek the ladies’ tailor. His name, so the young people understood, was Naphta. He was small and thin, clean-shaven, and of such piercing, one might almost say corrosive ugliness as fairly to astonish the cousins. Everything about him was sharp: the hooked nose dominating his face, the narrow, pursed mouth, the thick, bevelled lenses of his glasses in their light frame, behind which were a pair of pale-grey eyes—even the silence he preserved, which suggested that when he broke it, his speech would be incisive and logical. According to custom he was bare-headed and overcoatless—and moreover very well dressed, in a dark-blue flannel suit with white stripes. Its quiet but modish cut was at once marked down by the cousins, whose worldly glances were met by their counterpart, only quicker and keener, from the little man’s own side. Had Ludovico Settembrini not known how to wear with such easy dignity his threadbare pilot coat and check trousers, he must have suffered by contrast with his company. This happened the less in that the checks had been freshly pressed, doubtless by the hands of his landlord, and might, at a little distance, have been taken for new. The worldly and superior quality of the ugly stranger’s tailoring made him stand nearer to the cousins than to Settembrini; yet it was not only his age which ranged him rather with the latter, but also a quite pronounced something else, most conveniently exemplified by the complexion of the four. For the two younger were brown and burnt, the two elder pale: Joachim’s face had in the course of the winter turned an even deeper bronze, and Hans Castorp’s glowed rosy red under his blond poll. But over Herr Settembrini’s southern pallor, so well set off by his dark moustache, the sun’s rays had no power; while his companion, though blond-haired—his hair was a metallic, colourless ashenblond, and he wore it smoothed back from a lofty brow straight over his whole head—
also showed the dead-white complexion of the brunette races. Two out of the four—
Hans Castorp and Settembrini—carried walking-sticks; Joachim, as a military man, had none, and Naphta, after the introductions, clasped his hands again behind him. They, and his feet as well, were small and delicate, as befitted his build. He had a slight cold, and coughed unobtrusively.
Herr Settembrini at once and elegantly overcame the hint of embarrassment or vexation he had betrayed at first sight of the young people. He was in his gayest mood, and made all sorts of jesting allusions as he performed the introductions—for example, he called Naphta “princeps scholasticorum.” Joy, he said, quoting Aretine, held brilliant court within his, Settembrini’s, breast; a joy due to the blessing of the springtime—to which commend him. The gentlemen knew he had a certain grudge against life up here often enough he had railed against it!—All honour, then, to the mountain spring! It was enough of itself to atone for all the horrors of the place. All the disquieting, provocative elements of spring in the valley were here lacking: here were no seething depths, no steaming air, no oppressive humidity! Only dryness, clarity, a serene and piercing charm. It was after his own heart, it was superb. They were walking in an uneven row, four abreast whenever possible; when people came towards or passed them, Settembrini, on the right wing, had to walk in the road, or else their front for the moment broke up, and one or the other stepped back—either Hans Castorp, between the humanist and Cousin Joachim, or little Naphta on the left side. Naphta would give a short laugh, in a voice dulled by his cold: its quality in speaking was reminiscent of a cracked plate tapped on by the knuckle.
Indicating the Italian by a sidewise nod, he said, with a deliberate enunciation:
“Hark to the Voltairian, the rationalist! He praises nature, because even when she has the chance she doesn’t befog us with mystic vapours, but preserves a dry and classic clarity. And yet—what is the Latin for humidity?”
“Humor,” cried Settembrini, over his shoulder. “And the humour in the professor’s nature-observations lies in the fact that like Saint Catherine of Siena he thinks of the wounds of Christ when he sees a red primula in the spring.”
“That would be witty, rather than humorous,” Naphta retorted. “But in either case a good spirit to import into nature; and one of which she stands in need.”
“Nature,” said Settembrini, in a lower voice, not so much over as along his shoulder, “needs no importations of yours. She is Spirit herself.”
“Doesn’t your monism rather bore you?”
“Ah, you confess, then, that it is simply to divert yourself that you wrench God and nature apart, and divide the world into two hostile camps?”
“I find it most interesting to hear you characterize as love of diversion what I mean when I say Passion and Spirit.”
“And you, who put such large words to such empty uses, don’t forget that you sometimes reproach me for being rhetorical.”
“You will stick to it that Spirit implies frivolity. But it cannot help being what it is: dualistic. Dualism, antithesis, is the moving, the passionate, the dialectic principle of all Spirit. To see the world as cleft into two opposing poles—that is Spirit. All monism is tedious. Solet Aristoteles quærere pugnam.”
“Aristotle? Didn’t Aristotle place in the individual the reality of universal ideas?
That is pantheism.”
“Wrong. When you postulate independent being for individuals, when you transfer the essence of things from the universal to the particular phenomenon, which Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura, as good Aristotelians, did, then you destroy all unity between the world and the Highest Idea; you place the world outside of God and make God transcendent. That, my dear sir, is classic mediævalism.”
“Classic medievalism! What a phrase!”
“Pardon me, I merely apply the concept of the classic where it is in place: that is to say, wherever an idea reaches its culmination. Antiquity was not always classic. And I note in you a general repugnance to the Absolute; to the broader application of categories. You don’t even want absolute Spirit. You only want to have Spirit synonymous with democratic progress.”
“I should hope we are at one in the conviction that Spirit, however absolute, ought never to become the advocate of reaction.”
“Yet you are always claiming it as the advocate of freedom!”
“Why do you say ‘yet’? Is it freedom that is the law of love of one’s kind, or is it nihilism and all uncharitableness?”
“At any rate, it is the last two of which you are so obviously afraid.”
Settembrini flung up his arm. The skirmish broke off. Joachim looked bewildered from one to the other, and Hans Castorp with lifted brows stared at the path before him. Naphta had spoken sharply and apodictically; yet he had been the one to defend the broader conception of freedom. He had a way of saying “Wrong!” with a ringing nasal sound, and then clipping his lips tightly together over it—the effect was not ingratiating. Settembrini had countered for the most part lightly, yet with a fine warmth in his tone, as when he urged their essential agreement upon certain fundamental points. He now began, as Naphta did not speak again, to gratify the natural curiosity of the young people about the new-comer—some sort of explanation being obviously their due after the dialogue just ended. Naphta passively let him go on, without heeding. He was, so Settembrini said, professor of ancient languages in the Fridericianum—bringing out the title with pompous emphasis, as Italians do. His lot was the same as the speaker’s own: that is, he had been driven to the conclusion that his stay would be a long one, and had left the sanatorium for private quarters under the roof of Lukaçek the ladies’ tailor. The high school of the resort had cannily secured the services of this distinguished Latinist—the pupil of a religious house, as Settembrini father vaguely expressed it—and it went without saying that he was an adornment to his position. In short, Settembrini extolled the ugly Naphta not a little, regardless of the abstract disputation they had just had, which now, it seemed, was to be resumed.
Settembrini went on to explain the cousins to Herr Naphta, whereby it came out that he had already spoken of them. Here, he said, was the young engineer who had come up on three weeks’ leave, only to have Herr Hofrat Behrens find a moist place in his lung; and here was that hope of the Prussian army organization, Lieutenant Ziemssen. He spoke of Joachim’s revolt and intended departure, and added that one must not insult the Engineer by imputing to him any less zealous desire to return to his interrupted labours.
Naphta made a wry face.
“The gentlemen have an eloquent advocate. Far be it from me to question the accuracy of his interpretation of your thoughts and wishes. Work, work—why, he would call me nothing less than an enemy of mankind— inimicus humanæ naturæ— if I dared suggest that there have been times when talk in that vein would utterly fail to produce the desired effect: times when the precise opposite to his ideal was held in incomparably higher esteem. Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance, preached an order of progress towards perfection quite different from any Signor Ludovico ever dreamed of. Would you like to hear what it was? His lowest stage was in the ‘mill,’ the second on the ‘ploughed field,’ the third, and most commendable—don’t listen,
Settembrini!—was upon ‘the bed of repose.’ The mill was the symbol of earthly life—not a bad figure. The ploughed field represented the soul of the layman, the scene of the labours of priest and teacher. This was a stage higher than the mill. But the bed—”
“That will do, we understand,” cried Settembrini. “Sirs, is he going to expatiate now upon the purpose and uses of the ‘lewd day-bed’?”
“I did not know, Ludovico, that you were a prude. To see you looking at the girls. . . What has become of your pagan single-mindedness? I continue: the bed is the place of intercourse between the wooing and the wooed: symbolically, it typifies devotional retirement from the world for the purpose of contact with God.”
“Fie! Andate, andate!” the Italian fended him off, in a voice almost tearful. They all laughed. But Settembrini went on, with dignity: “No, no, I am a European, an Occidental, whereas the order of progress you describe is purely Eastern. The Orient abhors activity. Lao-Tse taught that inaction is more profitable than anything else between heaven and earth. When all mankind shall have ceased to do anything whatever, then only will perfect repose and bliss reign upon this earth. There you have your intercourse with God.”
“Oh, indeed! And what about Western mysticism—and what about quietism, a religion that numbers Fénelon among its disciples? Fénelon taught that every action is faulty, since every will to act is an insult to God, who wills to act alone. I cite the propositions of Molinos. There is no doubt that the spiritual possibility of finding salvation in repose has been disseminated pretty generally all over the world.”
Here Hans Castorp put in his word. With the courage of simplicity he mixed in the debate, and, gazing into space, delivered himself thus: “Devotion, retirement—there is something in it, it sounds reasonable. We practise a pretty high degree of retirement from the world, we up here. No doubt about it. Five thousand feet up, we lie in these excellent chairs of ours, contemplating the world and all that therein is, and having our thoughts about it. The more I think of it, the surer I am that the bed of repose—by which I mean my deck-chair, of course—has given me more food for thought in these ten months than the mill down in the flat-land in all the years before. There’s simply no denying it.”
Settembrini looked at him, a melancholy gleam in his dark eye. “Engineer!” he said, restrainingly. He took Hans Castorp’s arm and drew him a little aside, as though to speak to him in private “How often have I told you that one must realize what one is and think accordingly! Never mind the propositions. Our Western heritage is reason—
reason, analysis, action, progress: these, and not the slothful bed of monkish tradition!”
Naphta had been listening. He turned his head to say, “Monkish tradition! As if we did not owe to the monks the culture of the soil of all Europe! As if it were not due to them that Germany, France and Italy yield us corn and wine and fruit to-day, instead of being covered with primeval forest and swamp! The monks, my dear sir were hard workers—”
“Ebbè! Well, then!”
“Certainly against his intentions, at least. What I am calling your attention to is nothing less than the distinction between the utilitarian and the humane.”
“And what I am calling your attention to is the fact, which I observe with indignation, that you are still dividing the world up into opposing factions.”
“I grieve to have incurred your displeasure. Yet it is needful to make distinctions, and to preserve the conception of the Homo Dei, free from contaminating constituents. It was you Italians that invented banking and exchange, which may God forgive you! But the English invented the economic social theory, and the genius of humanity can never forgive them that.”
“Ah, the genius of humanity was alive in that island’s great economic thinkers too!—You wanted to say something Engineer?”
Hans Castorp demurred—yet said something anyhow, Naphta as well as Settembrini listening with a certain suspense: “From what you say, Herr Naphta, you must sympathize with my cousin’s profession, and understand his impatience to be at it. As for me I am an out-and-out civilian, my cousin often reproaches me with it. I have never seen service; I am a child of peace, pure and simple, and have even sometimes thought of becoming a clergyman—ask my cousin if I haven’t said as much to him many a time! But for all that, and aside from my personal inclinations—
or even, perhaps, not altogether aside from them—I have some understanding and sympathy for a military life. It has such an infernally serious side to it, sort of ascetic, as you say—that was the expression you used, wasn’t it? The military always has to reckon on coming to grip with death, just as the clergy has. That is why there is so much discipline and decorum and regularity in the army, so much ‘Spanish etiquette,’
if I may say so; and it makes no great difference whether one wears a uniform collar or a starched ruff, the main thing is the asceticism, as you so beautifully said.—I don’t know if I’ve succeeded in making my train of thought quite—”
“Oh, quite,” said Naphta, and flung a glance at Settembrini, who was twirling his cane and looking up at the sky.
“And that,” went on Hans Castorp, “is why I thought you must have great sympathy with the feelings of my cousin Ziemssen. I am not thinking of ‘Church and King’ and suchlike associations of ideas, that a lot of perfectly well-meaning and conventional people stand for. What I mean is that service in the army—service is the right word—
isn’t performed for commercial advantage, nor for the sake of the economic doctrine of society, as you call it—and that must be the reason why the English have such a small army, a few for India, and a few at home for reviews—”
“It is useless for you to go on, Engineer,” Settembrini interrupted him. “The soldier’s existence—I say this without intending the slightest offence to Lieutenant Ziemssen—cannot be cited in the argument, for the reason that, as an existence, it is purely formal—in and for itself entirely without content. Its typical representative is the infantry soldier, who hires himself out for this or that campaign. Take the soldiers of the Spanish Counter-Reformation, for instance, or of the various revolutionary armies, the Napoleonic or Garibaldian—or take the Prussian. I will be ready to talk about the soldier when I know what he is fighting for.”
“But that he does fight,” rejoined Naphta, “remains the distinctive feature of his existence as a soldier. Let us agree so far. It may not be enough of a distinction to permit of his being ‘cited in the argument’; but even so, it puts him in a sphere remote from the comprehension of your civilian, with his bourgeois acceptation of life.”
“What you are pleased to call the bourgeois acceptation of life,” retorted Settembrini, speaking rather tight-lipped, with the corners of his mouth drawn back beneath the waving moustache, while his neck screwed up and around out of his collar with fantastic effect, “will always be ready to enter the lists on any terms you like, for reason and morality, and for their legitimate influence upon young and wavering minds.”
A silence followed. The young people stared ahead of them, embarrassed. After a few paces, Settembrini said—having brought his head and neck to a natural posture once more: “You must not be surprised to hear this gentleman and me indulging in long disputations. We do it in all friendliness, and on a basis of considerable mutual understanding.”
That had a good effect—it was human and gallant of Herr Settembrini. But then Joachim, meaning well in his turn, and thinking to carry forward the conversation within harmless channels, was fated to say: “We happened to be talking about war, my cousin and I, as we came up behind you.”
“I heard you,” Naphta answered. “I caught your words and turned round. Were you talking politics, discussing the world situation?”
“Oh, no,” laughed Hans Castorp. “How should we come to be doing that? For my cousin here, it would be unprofessional to discuss politics; and as for me, I willingly forgo the privilege. I don’t know anything about it – I haven’t had a newspaper in my hand since I came.”
Settembrini, as once before, found this reprehensible. He proceeded to show himself immensely well informed upon current events, and gave his approval to the state of world affairs, in so far as they were running a course favourable to the progress of civilization. The European atmosphere was full of pacific thought and plans for disarmament. The democratic idea was on the march. He said he had it on reliable authority that the “Young Turks” were about to abandon their revolutionary undertakings. Turkey as a national, constitutional state—what a triumph for humanity!
“Liberalization of Islam,” Naphta scoffed. “Capital! enlightened fanaticism—oh, very good indeed! And of interest to you too,” he said, turning to Joachim. “Because when Abdul Hamid falls, then there will be an end of your influence in Turkey, and England will set herself up as protector.—You must always give full weight to the information you get from our friend Settembrini,” he said to both cousins—and this too sounded almost insolent: as though he thought they would be inclined to take Settembrini lightly. “On national-revolutionary matters he is very well informed. In his country they cultivate good relations with the English Balkan Committee. But what is to become of the Reval agreement, Ludovico, if your progressive Turks are
successful? Edward VII will no longer be able to give the Russians free access to the Dardanelles; and if Austria pulls herself together to pursue an active policy in the Balkans, why—”
“Oh, you, with your Cassandra prophecies!” Settembrini parried. “Nicholas is a lover of peace. We owe him the Hague conferences, which will always be moral events of the first order.”
“Yes, Russia must give herself time to recover from her little mishap in the East.”
“Fie, sir! Why should you scoff at human nature’s yearning for social amelioration?
A people that thwarts such aspirations exposes itself to moral obloquy. ‘
“But what is politics for, then, if not to give both sides a chance to compromise themselves in turn?”
“Are you espousing the cause of Pan-Germanism?”
Naphta shrugged his shoulders, which were not quite even—in fact, to add to his ugliness, he was probably a little warped. He disdained to reply, and Settembrini pronounced judgment: “At all events, what you say is cynical. You see nothing but political trickery in the lofty exertions of democracy to fulfil itself internationally—”
“Where you would like me to see idealism or even religiosity. What I do see is the last feeble stirrings of the instinct of self-preservation, the last remnant at the command of a condemned world-system. The catastrophe will and must come—it
advances on every hand and in every way. Take the British policy. England’s need to secure the Indian glacis is legitimate. But what will be the consequences of it? Edward knows as well as you and I that Russia has to make good her losses in Manchuria, and that internal peace is as necessary to her as daily bread. Yet—he probably can’t help himself—he forces her to look westward for expansion, stirs up slumbering rivalries between St. Petersburg and Vienna—”
“Oh, Vienna! Your interest in that ancient obstruction is due, I presume, to the fact that her decaying empire is a sort of mummy, as it were, of the Holy Roman Empire of the German people.”
“While you, I suppose, are Russophil out of humanistic affinity with Cæsaropapism.
“Democracy, my friend, has more to hope from the Kremlin than she has from the Hofburg; and it is disgraceful for the country of Luther and Gutenberg—”
“It is probably not only disgraceful, but stupid into the bargain. But even this stupidity is an instrument of fate—”
“Oh, spare me your talk about fate! Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate!”
“One always wills one’s fate. Capitalistic Europe is willing hers.”
“One believes in the coming of war if one does not sufficiently abhor it.”
“Your abhorrence of war is logically disjointed if you do not make the state itself your point of departure.”
“The national state is the temporal principle, which you would like to ascribe to the evil one. But when nations are free and equal, when the small and weak are safeguarded from aggression, when there is justice in the world, and national boundaries—”
“Yes, I know, the Brenner frontier. The liquidation of Austria. If I only knew how you expect to bring that about without war!”
“And I should like to know when I ever condemned a war for the purpose of realizing national aspirations!”
“But you say—”
“No, here I must really corroborate Herr Settembrini,“ Hans Castorp mixed in the dispute, which he had been following as they went, regarding attentively each speaker in turn, with his head on one side. “My cousin and I have had the privilege of frequent conversations with him on this and kindred subjects—what it amounted to, of course, was that we listened while he explained and developed his views—so I can vouch for the fact, and my cousin here will confirm me, that Herr Settembrini spoke more than once, with great enthusiasm, of the revolutionary principle, and about rebellion and reform—which is no very peaceful principle, I should think—and of the mighty efforts still to be made before it triumphs everywhere, and the great universal worldrepublic can come into being. Those were his words, though of course it sounded much more plastic and literary as he said it. But the part I have the most exact memory of, and have retained quite literally, because being a thorough-going civilian I found it quite alarming, was that he said the day would come, if not on the wings of doves, then on the pinions of eagles—it was the eagles’ pinions I was startled at—and that Vienna must be brought low before peace and prosperity could ensue. So it is not possible to say that Herr Settembrini condemned war as such. Am I right, Herr Settembrini?”
“More or less,” said the Italian shortly, twirling his cane, with averted head.
“Too bad,” Naphta smiled maliciously. “There you are, convicted of warlike
inclinations out of the mouth of your own pupil. ‘ Assument pennas ut aqailæ’ —”
“Voltaire himself approved of a war for civilization, and advised Frederick to fight Turkey.”
“Instead of which, he allied himself with her—he he! And then the world-republic!
I refrain from asking what becomes of the principle of revolt when peace and prosperity have once been brought about. For it is plain that from that moment rebellion becomes a crime—”
“You know quite well, as do these young men here, that we are dealing with a progress in human affairs conceived of as endless.”
“But all motion is in circles,” said Hans Castorp. “In space and time, as we learn from the law of periodicity and the conservation of mass. My cousin and I were talking about it lately. How then can progress be conceived of, in closed motion without constant direction? When I lie in the evening and look at the zodiac—that is, the half of it that is visible to us—and think about the wise men of antiquity—”
“You ought not to brood and dream, Engineer,” Settembrini interrupted him. “You must resolve to trust to the instincts of your youth and your blood, urging you in the direction of action. And also your training in natural science is bound to link you to progressive ideas. You see, through the space of countless ages, life developing from infusorium up to man: how can you doubt, then, that man has yet before him endless possibilities of development? And in the sphere of the higher mathematics, if you would rest your case thereon, then follow your cycle from perfection to perfection, and, from the teaching of our eighteenth century, learn that man was originally good, happy, and without sin, that social errors have corrupted and perverted him, and that he can and will once more become good, happy, and sinless, by dint of labour upon his social structure—”
“Herr Settembrini has omitted to add,” broke in Naphta, “that the Rousseauian idyll is a sophisticated transmogrification of the Church’s doctrine of man’s original free and sinless state, his primal nearness and filial relation to God; to which state he must finally return. But the re-establishment of the City of God, after the dissolution of all earthly forms, lies at the meeting-place of the earthly and the heavenly, the material and the spiritual; redemption is transcendental—and as for your capitalistic worldrepublic, my dear Doctor, it is odd in this connexion to hear you talking about instinct. The instinctive is entirely on the side of the national. God Himself has implanted in men’s breasts the instinct which bids them separate into states. War—”
“War,” echoed Settembrini, “war, my dear sir, has been forced before now to serve the cause of progress; as you will grant if you will recall certain events in the history of your favourite epoch—I mean the period of the Crusades. These wars for civilization stimulated economic and commercial relations between peoples, and united Western humanity in the name of an idea.”
“And how tolerant you always are towards an idea! I would the more courteously remind you that the effect of the Crusades and the economic relations they stimulated was anything but favourable to internationalism. On the contrary, they taught the peoples to become conscious of themselves, and thus furthered the development of the national idea.”
“Right; that is to say, right in so far as it was a question of the relation between the peoples and the priesthood; for it was indeed at that time that the mounting consciousness of national honour began to harden itself against hieratical presumption—”
“Though what you call hieratical presumption is nothing else than the conception of human unity in the name of the Spirit!”
“We are familiar with that spirit—and we have no great love for it.”
“Your mania for nationalism obviously shrinks from the world-conquering cosmopolitanism of the Church. Still, I cannot see how you reconcile your nationalism with your horror of war. Because your obsolescent cult of the State must make you a champion of a positive conception of law, and as such—”
“Oh, if we are talking about law—the conceptions of natural law and universal human reason have survived, my dear sir, in international law.”
“Pshaw, your international law is only another Rousseauian transmogrification of the ius divinum, which has nothing in common with either nature or human reason, resting as it does upon revelation—”
“Let us not quarrel over names, Professor! What I call natural and international law, you are free to call the ius divinum. The important thing is that above the explicit jurisprudence of national states there rises a higher jurisdiction, empowered to decide between conflicting interests by means of courts of arbitration.”
“Courts of arbitration! The very name is idiotic! In a civil court, to pronounce upon matters of life and death, communicate the will of God to man, and decide the course of history!—Well, so much for the ‘wings of doves.’ Now for the ‘eagles’ pinions’—
what about them?”
“Civilian society—”
“Oh, society doesn’t know what it wants. It shouts for a campaign against the fall in the birth-rate, it demands a reduction in the cost of bringing up children and training them to a profession—and meanwhile men are herded like cattle, and all the trades and professions are so overcrowded that the fight round the feeding-trough puts in the shade the horrors of past wars. Open spaces, garden cities! Strengthening the stock!
But why strengthen it, if civilization and progress have decided there shall be no more war? Whereas war would cure everything—it would ‘strengthen the stock’ and at the same time stop the decline in the birth-rate.”
“You are joking, of course—you can’t mean what you say. And our discussion
comes to an end at the right moment, for here we are,” Settembrini said, and pointed out to the cousins with his stick the cottage before whose gate they had paused. It stood near the beginning of the village: a modest structure, separated from the street by a narrow front garden. A wild grape-vine, springing from bare roots at the door, flung an arm along the ground-floor wall towards the display window of a tiny shop. The ground-floor, Settembrini explained, belonged to the chandler; Naphta was domiciled a floor higher up, with the tailor’s shop, and his own quarters were in the roof, where he had a peaceful little study.
Naphta, with unexpectedly spontaneous cordiality, expressed the hope that he might have the pleasure of meeting them again. “Come and see us,” he said. “I would say:
‘Come and see me,’ if Dr. Settembrini here had not prior claims upon your friendship. Come, however, as often as you like, whenever you feel you would like a talk. I prize highly an interchange of ideas with youth, and am perhaps not entirely without pedagogic tradition. Our Master of the Lodge here”—he nodded toward
Settembrini—“would have it that the bourgeois humanism of the day has a monopoly of the pedagogic gift; but we must take issue with him. Until another time, then!”
Settembrini made difficulties—there were difficulties, he said. The days of the Lieutenant’s sojourn up here were numbered; and as for the Engineer, he would doubtless redouble his zeal in the service of the cure, in order to follow his cousin down to the valley with all the speed he might.
Both young men assented in turn. They had bowed their acceptance of Herr
Naphta’s invitation, and next minute they also bowed their acknowledgment of the justice of Herr Settembrini’s remarks. So everything was left open.
“What did he call him?” asked Joachim, as they climbed the winding path to the Berghof.
“I understood him to say ‘Master of the Lodge,’ ” answered Hans Castorp. “I was just wondering about it. It was probably some joke or other, they have such odd names for each other. Settembrini called Naphta ‘ princeps scholasticorum’— not so bad, either. The schoolmen were the theologians of the Middle Ages, the dogmatic philosophers, if you like. They spoke several times of the Middle Ages; it reminded me of the first day I came, when Settembrini said there was a good deal up here that was mediæval—it was Adriatica von Mylendonk, her name, I mean, made him say so.—How did you like him?”
“Who? The little man? Not very much. Though he said some things I liked. That about courts of arbitration—they are nothing but canting hypocrisy, of course. But I did not care much for the man himself—a person may say as many good things as he likes, it doesn’t matter to me, if he himself is a queer fish. And queer he is, you can’t deny it. That stuff about the ‘place of intercourse’ was distinctly shady, not to mention anything else. And did you see the big Jewish nose he had? Nobody but Jews have such puny figures. Are you really thinking of visiting the man?”
“Visit him—of course we’ll visit him,” declared Hans Castorp. “When you talk about his being puny, that’s only the military in you speaking. And as for his nose, the Chaldeans had the same kind, and they knew devilish well what they were about, on more subjects than alchemy. Naphta has something of the mystagogue about him, he interests me a good deal. I won’t say that I make him out altogether, yet, but if we meet him often perhaps we shall; I don’t think it at all unlikely we may learn something from the acquaintance with him.”
“Oh, you, with your learning! Getting wiser all the time, with your biology, and your botany, and your continual changing from one idea to another! You began philosophizing about time the first day you came. But we didn’t come up here to acquire wisdom. We came to acquire health, to get healthier and healthier until we are entirely well, and are free to quit, and go down below where we belong!”
“ ‘Of old sat Freedom on the heights,’ ” quoted Hans Castorp airily. “Tell me first what freedom is,” he went on. “Naphta and Settembrini disputed over it a good deal without coming to any conclusion. Settembrini says it is the law of love of one’s kind; that sounds like his ancestor, the Carbonaro. But however valiant he was, and however valiant our Settembrini himself is—”
“Yes, he got uncomfortable when we talked about physical courage.”
“I can’t help thinking he would be afraid of things little Naphta wouldn’t be, and that his freedom and his bravery are more or less folderol. Do you think he would have the courage ‘ de se perdre ou même se laisser dépérir’?”
“Why do you suddenly begin talking French?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The atmosphere up here is so international. I don’t know which would find more pleasure in it—Settembrini for the sake of his bourgeois worldrepublic, or Naphta for his hierarchical cosmopolis. As you see, I kept my ears open; but even so I found it far from clear. On the contrary, the result was more confusion than anything else.”
“It always is. You will find that when people discuss and express their views nothing ever comes of it but confusion worse confounded. I tell you, it doesn’t matter in the least what a man’s views are, so long as he is a decent chap. The best thing is to have no opinions, and just do one’s duty.”
“Yes, you can say that because you are a soldier, and your existence is purely formal. But it’s different with me, I am a civilian, and more or less responsible. And I must say it’s rather upsetting to have on the one hand a man preaching an
international world-republic, and absolutely barring war, and yet so patriotic that he is for ever demanding the rectification of the Brenner frontier, to the point of fighting a war for civilization over it; and then on the other a little chap contending that every national state is an invention of the devil, and hurrahing for some universal unification he sees on the far horizon—yet in the next minute justifying our national instincts and making awful fun of peace conferences. What a mix-up! By all means we must go visit him, and try to understand what it is all about. You say we did not come up here to get wiser, but healthier, and that is true. But all this confusion must be reconciled; and if you don’t think so, why then you are dividing the world up into two hostile camps, which, I may tell you, is a grievous error, most reprehensible.”